


Magic in the Real World

by blackhorseandthecherrytree



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mad Swan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-06
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-04 12:09:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 32
Words: 4,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/710633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackhorseandthecherrytree/pseuds/blackhorseandthecherrytree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a set of assorted mad swan drabbles from a mad swan prompt table on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. madness

Disclaimer: I don't own Once Upon a Time.

* * *

**1\. madness**

“Much madness is divinest Sense,” he whispers into her ear, “to a discerning Eye. Tell me, Emma, do you have a discerning eye?”

She tries not to shiver. Because, yes, sometimes she’s thought she’s had. Sometimes she’s seen things no one else knew was there. There’s always been something just that different about her than everyone else. 

But she’s spent her entire life trying to squash that something else, to fit in, so she closes her eyes, breathes, and ignores the tickling in her spine, that awareness of something else there.

This is the only world there is. 


	2. hats

**2\. hats**

Hats, hats, hats; far too many hats for his taste; and yet never hats enough, never the hat he needs, because that hat that he needs isn’t his, you see.

“Make me a hat,” he tells his eight fingers, two thumbs. “Spin it out of cobwebs and dreams. Fill it with magic.”

But each hat that he makes is only despair, and loneliness, and never fits right upon his head; and therefore is doomed to sit, headless, with every hat that he’s ever made before it all piled up in towers. No wonder he fails.

Perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised that the Savior’s hat is shaped the same. But she must be over-brimming with magic, full to bursting, because when he puts it on his head it fits perfectly.


	3. rabbits

**3\. rabbits**

At night he dreams of rabbits, instead of sheep. Grace raised rabbits, until they grew too large for her rabbit hutch, and then they let them go free and roam into the forest. Their neighbors hadn’t liked that, but it was too late by then to reclaim them. 

Jefferson thinks he recognizes one of them as the bartender of the Rabbit Hole. A nice bit of irony, to see him here. That one’d always been uncannily vicious.

He smirks to see the new sheriff throw him in the jail for a night.


	4. Alice

**4 - Alice.**

Tell anyone, and she’ll kill you, but Emma is a hardcore  _Alice in Wonderland_  fan. 

Not to the point of actually owning paraphernalia, of course. She learned the hard way that if you don’t keep a limit on your possessions, it’s easy for people to take them away from you. Owning a dogeared paperback copy of  _Alice in Wonderland_  and  _Through the Looking Glass_  (with the original artwork) is as far as she goes. She got it five years ago, and she’s surprised it’s lasted this long. It’s her go-to when she’s feeling melancholy and alone.

But maybe once she dated a douchebag to get access to his Xbox long enough to play through American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, and maybe she had the Scifi Channel’s Alice on DVD three months before it broke. Maybe she went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in theatres, and booed every time it got something wrong. Maybe she even watched that trippy Czech version, just because. 

Alice started her mild obsession with chess; Alice taught her logic and whimsy; Alice made her feel like it was okay if the world didn’t quite make sense. Alice said it was okay not to trust the people around her, because they didn’t always have her best interests in mind. Alice said that she wasn’t alone, even if she was, because other people were alone too. Of course, Alice got to go home after her adventures, but not everyone could pick their histories. 

So maybe it’s not so much a coincidence, that Jefferson’s the one that got through to her the most. There was that long strain of logic to his madness. But maybe it’s a testament to her faith in reality that in the end, she chose not to believe him. In the end, Alice was only ever dreaming. In the end, the only things that were true were the things right in front of you.


	5. feathers

**5\. feathers**

It’s like feathers, trickling through his mind - this thought he can’t catch. Tickling, mickling, drickling - just on the tip of his tongue. And it is frustrating, because he has to be able to know his own mind. He cannot have an episode. He has to be sane, for the Savior. She’s his only way out. 

She’s the only way out.


	6. death

**6\. death**

Grace’s mother is dead. 

I’m sorry, Emma says.

Yes. Well. She would be. Decent person, and all that. But it’s not her fault, so he doesn’t mind.

I’m not a decent person, she says, and Jefferson realizes that he’d said it out loud. Most days, I don’t rate that much. But it really is sad that she’s dead. I’m sorry for you, and for Grace.

Jefferson smiles. That’s your self-esteem talking, he says. You’re much better than you think you are. 

And Grace’s mother? she asks.

He thinks, and is careful to keep his thoughts separate from his words. She’s dead, he says, eventually. Grace is all I have left of her. 

Emma’s hand slips into his. 


	7. world

**7\. world**

It’s a wide, wide world, this world without magic. Perfectly round, like a pear, and as scrumptious. Jefferson spent the first ten years just learning about it, when he wasn’t watching Grace. If it weren’t for this curse, he would take his daughter and they would go exploring. 

That was the one thing about portal-jumping he missed: always a new world, a new horizon, a new beach, forest, prairie, frontier. Cities and buildings, temples and towns, roads and ships and castles. Flat worlds, square worlds, disc worlds. 

The Mirror says that the Savior rarely stayed anywhere for more than a year, moving from place to place inside this land. She’d be a good portal-jumper, he thinks. She understands the need to move, the power of variety, how important it is not to get trapped.

Except she doesn’t, really. She moves so that she can keep moving forward. She moves because she’d never found her home.

(Maybe that was true of him, too.)


	8. reality

**8\. reality**

“Reality can shift,” Jefferson says. “Different worlds, different planes of reality, different rules. The things possible here aren’t possible elsewhere, and vice versa. No world is exactly the same as another.”

Emma studies him. She’d seen this in him, back when they first met - the patience of her kidnapper, the certainty that she would just get it if she looked at it hard enough. She wished more of her teachers in school had been like him. She might actually have learned something, instead of being ignored.

She picked up her pencil, focusing on the solidity and physicality of wood in a way she’d never really noticed before, and drew a tree with nine branches, labelling each. “So it’s like this.” She drew offshoots from the branches, labelling those as well. “And then these are the offshoots of the nine realms.” She drew fruit. “And these are the worlds?”

His hand on her shoulder is warm, and there, and very, very real. Her stomach feels fluttery and her skin is all pinpricks like they haven’t been since she was a teenager, even as Jefferson corrects her drawing. 


	9. imagination

**9\. imagination**

Emma’s not much of a singer, and never has been. But she can croon like a champ, do the soft lullaby every American kid learns with Dumbo and Tarzan. So when Jefferson asks her, she starts off small, slow, and quiet, softly, propping herself up on one arm.

“Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.” He doesn’t know the song, so he doesn’t have the associations, but she can always forcefeed him Willy Wonka later. Besides, it might actually be real. Jefferson could’ve met the real Willy Wonka. That particular mental image makes her laugh internally. “We’ll begin, with a spin, traveling in the world of my creation. What we’ll see will defy explanation.”

The smile on his face is worth it. 


	10. Handcuffs

**10\. handcuffs**

Emma wasn’t quite sure she’d gotten into this mess. Or how she was going to get out, she mused as she stared at the keys she’d just accidentally kicked away, instead of gently edging towards her.

Handcuffed to a madman in his jail cell.  _Great_. 

“You could always try using magic,” Jefferson singsonged behind her.

Emma rattled the handcuffs through the bars of the cell. “You could always try not being such a pain in the ass.”

“You could always try true love’s kiss,” he snarked right back. “I know we don’t have it, but if you kiss yourself enough, maybe it’ll work.”

With an effort, Emma pushed herself up. No point trying for them now, it was too far. “You could try not spying on little girls through telescopes and generally being a creeper.”

Behind her, Jefferson laughed. “You try spending twenty-eight years trapped in a town where nothing changes, in a house you can’t leave, and then tell me you wouldn’t do the same just to get a glimpse of the one person you had left to care about.”

Emma puffed shortly to get the hair out of her face and failed. Grimacing, she used her free hand to brush it away. “You try twenty-eight years of being told that you were nobody special and no one wanted you, and then having someone tell you you had magic.”

She twisted to try to put herself in a more comfortable position. It probably wasn’t going to happen, since the handcuffs were linked right next to the lock, but she could try. And with some luck, in a couple of hours Mary Margaret or David would notice she was missing and send someone after her.

Jefferson’s profile was static and still, almost chiseled and too damn handsome, even now. “What?”

He spoke slowly. “I would’ve thought your parents would have set better guardians over you.”

“They didn’t really get the opportunity.” They’d given her Pinocchio, but it hadn’t been enough. And it wasn’t like they knew his reputation, anyways. 

“Ah.” Emma couldn’t really tell what he was thinking. Their resident Mad Hatter was enigmatic, hard to read, except for when he chose to tell you. 

“Anyways, I couldn’t use magic,” she said, feeling a little obligated. She’d known he was telling the truth. She’d chosen to believe he was crazy. “You have to learn skills and have focuses. It’s not so easy as just willing stuff to happen.”

“So that’s why the hat didn’t work right.”

Emma whipped her head around. He was smiling. “It worked?”

He shrugged. “It got me out. But it didn’t get me to another world.”

She settled back. “Huh.” That was interesting. She wondered if he’d tell her where it had taken her if she asked. Probably not. Anyways, she had the hat. She could always find out on her own.

“My inside pocket.”

“What about your inside pocket?”

“I have,” and he jingled it, “some very useful lockpicks in there. If you’d be so kind as to stretch over and get them, and not knock them into the toilet. I’d get them, but it’s awkward positioning.”

Emma breathed, rolled her eyes, and reached over him and into his waistcoat pocket.

-

They were very good lock picks, she thought later. If he wanted them back, he’d just have to come get them.


	11. Black Eyes

**11\. black eyes**

The first time Emma got a black eye, she was six, finally old enough to fight in the other kids’ minds. She never knew why they picked on her more than the other kids, but she’s always known one thing: she hates bullies.

The first time Jefferson got a black eye, he was four. He’s never cared much for either of his parents. 


	12. Sanity

**12\. sanity**

He’s sane. He knows he is. (or he’s as sane as anyone can be, really; and if you’re not sane what are you who are you mad mad not mad a hatter not a hatter not a mad hatter not mad he’s sane.)

He is sane, as perfectly sane as it is possible to be after three years in the Queen of Hearts’ castle and twenty-eight years in this pleasant little boring little town. 

 _You’re insane_ , the Savior says, and his resolve cannot crumble.


	13. Portals

**13\. portals**

The first portal Emma makes consciously is gorgeous. Large, round, swirling, with a taste of stars and magic. It feels like expansion, exploration, old episodes of Star Trek mixed in with that British blue box show Martha used to watch and the smell of carnivals.

She can’t help but smile as she and Jefferson jump in. 


	14. Yellow

_  
_ **14\. yellow**

_Yellow is the color of my true love’s hair_ , he thinks, winding it around his fingers. It smells of coconut shampoo. The song never mentioned that. But then again, songs never do.

“I miss your curls,” he says aloud.

Emma snorts. “Yeah? Well I miss your face.” There’s an odd sort of smile lingering around her lips, wry bemusement and relaxation and something very much like openness, for a woman with so many walls. 

“Ew,” Grace says matter-of-factly from the other room. She still hasn’t gotten over King Charming and Queen Snow moving in, but she got very quickly accustomed to Emma. Jefferson’s still working the logistics of that one out.

“Get a room, kid,” Emma calls out, and dives in for a kiss.


	15. Red

**15\. red**

Red’s one of Emma’s favorite colors, bright and vibrant and glowing. She’s always felt strong in red, as if she could take on the world. That’s why she shelled out the money for the red jacket first. 

Painted across Jefferson’s ornately patterned black and white wallpaper, it’s different. But it’s a message, so she steels herself and looks for clues.

It’s spraypaint, not blood.


	16. Blue

**16\. blue**

For their first date, Emma wears blue. A nod to her childhood, maybe. Maybe to every inch of her that remembers what it’s like to feel innocent. Or maybe just to be girly and carefree, for a bit. 

Besides, the skirt swirls. That’s reason enough.

(It has nothing to do with the fact that her mother picked it out for her.)

She meets Jefferson at the new Cajun restaurant that’s sprung up in town. He matches.


	17. Water

Water rushes down, steaming, and for a minute Emma loses herself. Her boyfriend has good water pressure. There’s a reason she takes her showers at his house.

His arm snakes around her waist. That’s the other reason.


	18. Suits

One by one the suits go marching past, like spinning clockwork. They think he doesn’t know when his guards change, but he does, he does for a certain, he’s timed it with the watch he stole from the white rabbit that ticks and ticks and ticks and never stops.

A hat for flair, and he can walk out like any other citizen of Wonderland. Uffish, he says to his reflection. And then stops.

The suits in red and black find him pulling out his hair, screaming at his brain, useless. It is three days in isolation, and not a speck of blue anywhere to be found. He has time to calm himself down, away from the mercury fumes. He can breathe.

The queen chops off his head again for insubordination, and reattaches it swiftly. He is returned to his chambers and told to make another hat. It feels like breaking.

Instead he slams butter into the workings of his pocketwatch. 

It doesn’t make it better, but it doesn’t make it worse. And it’s the best alternative to another damned suit.


	19. Blonde

Grace’s hair has gotten blonder as she’s grown up. Henry’s a little envious of that, until Emma tells him that it’s like his father’s. Which it is. But white lies are white lies, and she can’t feel sorry for this one. 

Henry’s father left me nothing but a stolen car and a broken heart, she tells Jefferson. It’s her personalized country song, her two years in Tallahassee, her year of working to drink her disillusioned and bitter heart out before she put herself back together. She doesn’t know where he is or why he went or how he could lie to her. These things she does not know have eaten at her for years. She believed she could never love again. She learned to never trust truly again, because everyone will leave you.

(until the day came when her lack of trust was like a lack of oxygen and she had to trust somebody; but never surprised when that someone betrayed her; surprised more by people being there for her when they had every reason not to be; never surprised by heroes not being all they were cracked up to be, never surprised that of course this is what her life was going to be)

(until the day came when magic was kissed into her life and fairytales became real and true love was a thing)

(until her parents swore that they loved her, and actually followed up on it; until she saw her teenage face reflected in the face of a boy named Bae; until she saw a man love his daughter like she’d always wanted to be loved, until she met her match, until she opened herself up without even meaning to. until she made one choice, and another, like zigzags leading ultimately to the same place)

(until she opened herself up to love, and love opened itself up to her, and she couldn’t understand how she had ever lived without)

(until she knew that she would probably never have a complete resolution, and she would have to find a way to be okay with that, because real life was never like the stories, even for fairy tales. real life was always messier.)

Jefferson watches her as if she is a wild thing. Which she is, but she is also tame. She’s lived so long with walls that she can’t bear to put them up again, not when she can keep them down. Her heart is his. He has never done anything but treat it gently, even when his mind was screaming with impatience and frustration at her disbelief in things that must have seemed as real to him as the pillars of the universe.

When she looks at Grace, she sees some of what she could’ve been, had she been so lucky, and she tells her lover that she is glad he is in her life. 

Family means something now, means everything now. The people she can love are hers, and she belongs to them in turn. She has a heritage now, and something to pass down. 

Blonde hair, from her father to herself to Grace and possibly to Henry’s child, or her own. And so much more than a deadend life. 


	20. Road

A road’s a never-ending thing, Jefferson thinks. You start out, and you don’t stop. Even when you come back home, you’re not the same. And neither is your home.

She’ll be back. He straightens up.


	21. Car

Emma knew that the first thing she would need when she left the system was a car. 

…Well, okay, maybe not the first first thing. But up there. She didn’t know exactly what it would look like when she found it, but she knew it was out there, and it would be perfect.

Ten years later, it’s still hers. It’s been through about as much wear and tear as she has. It’s her baby. Which is why, Jefferson says, it makes the perfect magical focus.

Her car means freedom, and independence, and the open road, and it flies for them perfectly.


	22. Guillotine

_Snicker-snack_  goes the jib of the guillotine, fast and efficient outside his window. You’d think the Queen would relish each execution personally, but knowing that she’s sent hundreds of people to their not-deaths seems to suit her just fine.

From what the dormouse in the teacup has told him, she went for the nobility first, crushing and snapping and forcing them to bend their knees. And then she was indiscriminate. All it took was an accusation from a good citizen for you to earn your head cut off, and then you were at the mercy of the state.

 _Snicker-snack_ , goes the guillotine.  _Snickety-snick_  goes his scissors. 


	23. she thought it was a dream

Dreams are different from reality. Anything can happen, Emma knows; events slur into and out of each other with dizzying speed. She feels woozy, out of focus - so why wouldn’t it be a dream? Why not?

Some distant part of her brain tells her to stop thinking too much and just kiss the man and be damned with it. 

_Well, why not?_


	24. bad habits

“You leave socks all over the floor.”

“You leave the toothpaste out.”

“You don’t shave.”

“They’re my legs! It’s none of your business!”

“They are when I’m the one kissing them.”

“…You shave them.”


	25. movie night

It’s a warm night in June. Emma’s flopped on Jefferson’s couch, her head in his lap. Grace and Henry are seated on the floor.

The movie playing is  _Lilo and Stitch_. 


	26. a first time

Emma offers him the keys to her Bug. “There’s a first time for everything.”

Jefferson eyes them with something like disdain. “Not for stick shift.”

She rolls her eyes. “Try it. I promise I’ll rescue you if you get into trouble.”


	27. high school au

Fourth period was Emma’s study hall - read: free period. Mr. Gold just slept or graded papers the whole time. It was a joke. 

But it gave her time to search the open lockers for a good lunch, so she didn’t mind that much. She tried to vary the lockers she stole from, so that people didn’t lose their lunches more than once. She kept a list of the good lockers, people with lots of food who could afford to lose a few items. Usually she just scavenged snacks from lockers.

Some people didn’t care. Others learned, and got locks. She tried not to think too hard about the kids who couldn’t afford padlocks. Or the ones that she destroyed by picking the lock.

Most of all, she tried to be careful. She wasn’t the only kid whose family couldn’t afford lunches, after all, and if she overgrazed she’d ruin it for everyone.

She checked for teachers up and down the hall, opened up Locker #578, and stared.

This kid had a canister of – she sniffed – tea, sandwiches with some weird kind of lettuce and cucumbers, a pear, and a container of applesauce.

She took the pear, one of the sandwiches, and went on to the next locker, marking it as a possible return.

-

Emma did research, and discovered that the weird lettuce was watercress. It’d been spicy against the cool of the cucumber, and unexpectedly she found herself liking it. It went against all the rules she’d set for herself, but she went back two days later to see if there was any more.

The kid – some guy the same grade she was, probably in biology class that period since that was the only book he was missing – had made three sandwiches.

…Maybe he just wouldn’t notice.

-

A week later, she checked again. Now he had two sandwiches, two apples, two containers of tea, and…a note. 

“It’s not polite to take without asking.” And a number.

Emma took the sandwich, the apple, and the tea. She left the note.

-

“So you’re the one who stole my food.”

Emma looked up the bleachers. Jefferson, that guy who did photography for the school newspaper. She went for casual. “If you’re looking for a sheriff, I think the hall monitor went that way.”

“Nah.” He sat next to where she was sprawled, leaned over, and whispered, “I have footage.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “Footage of what?”

“You. Stealing my lunch.” He didn’t look at her. Probably looking at Regina and the cheerleaders, Emma thought, nettled. “I think the school looks down on that.”

“Not that I’m admitting anything,” Emma said, “but you keep a camera in your locker?” And where? She hadn’t seen anything near that bulky.

 “Somebody stole from me. I wanted to find out who.” He shrugged. “And it turned out to be you.”

Slowly, Emma sat up. “What do you want?”

He pursed his lips, looked off into the distance, and then at her. “Look, if you’re gonna steal my food, you might as well eat it with me. I put a lot of time into them.”

She’d never seen Jefferson sitting with people in the cafeteria, Emma realized. Not that she did much more than hang out, and she still thought of herself as a loner, but at least she had circles. “You want me to hang out with you after I stole your food?”

“Normally, I just get stuffed into lockers, instead of people leaving things nice and orderly.” He didn’t change his posture, but Emma got the idea that he wasn’t lying about the getting stuffed into a locker thing. Which…changed things. “Besides, people shouldn’t go hungry if they don’t have to. You’re a foster kid, right?”

Emma tensed. “Maybe.”

He nodded. “Makes sense.”

“What the hell do you know about foster kids?”

“Enough to know you get a bad rap when you don’t deserve it. I had a friend in elementary. It wasn’t cool.” He looked at her. “Besides, I saw you helping Ashley. You’re a good person.”

She looked down. “Not that good,” she mumbled. She just hadn’t liked the way Regina was picking on a pregnant girl. “We have Spanish together, right?”

“Yeah.” He shifted. Maybe she’d made him uncomfortable, Emma thought. Good.

“Bring lunch then. You’ll have a buddy in the cafeteria.” Mary Margaret would like him, she knew. She was that type. And maybe it could even be fun. Emma narrowed her eyes. “But I want that footage. Got it?”

Jefferson settled in besides her, and smirked. “Sure.”

Maybe the smirking thing was the reason why he didn’t have any friends, Emma reflected. Still, she was stuck with him now. Might as well figure things out for however long this lasted.


	28. high school au redux

“Seriously, what’s with you and apples?”

Jefferson eyerolled at her. Unbelievable. He was stealing all her facial expressions. “Are you saying you don’t like my food?”

Emma darted a glance at Miss Malinche, and then whispered, “I’m just saying you’re a little repetitive. And fancy. Have you ever even heard of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

Jefferson blinked. “What’s peanut butter?” At Emma’s mock glare, he relented. “My sister doesn’t like peanut butter. She has allergies.”

“Huh.” Emma thought about this, and chomped into her apple. “So your sister makes your lunches.”

He rolled his eyes again - just to prove that he could do it, Emma thought. “It’s a joint effort.”


	29. crazy

Emma knows reality, and Emma knows fantasy. When she grew up, she stopped believing in magic. It’s what you do, when you lose your baby teeth and what childhood you had left. 

But there are times when all rationality leaves you, when the only option is to scream at a world gone mad and disordered.

In that moment, Emma tears magic out of thin air with her teeth.


	30. rage

In Wonderland, all his rage was useless before the Queen’s contumely. He learned to control himself. To watch. To wait, into the fraying ends of patience and despair.

So when Jefferson truly goes unhinged -  _snicker snack, little quack, papa’s coming to cut your face_  - 

it 

    is a monster

                               with a three-lipped grin

_Smile, boy. I might not kill you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use your guts for my nice new garters._


	31. forbidden

All her life, Emma’s felt this…longing. For what, she can’t say. Most of the time, she doesn’t even know she has it because she doesn’t know what it’s like to be without it. 

All she knows is that the sky is never satisfyingly blue, and birdsong feels strangely empty, and that sometimes at night she can feel herself grasping for something that isn’t there.

 _Shut up, stupid,_  she tells herself fiercely. _This is all there is._


	32. temptation

“I don’t know who you are, but my name is Paige, and my parents love me, and I want you to go away because you’re  _scaring_  me!”


End file.
